BooksLeaving Home
'Tender, transporting, creative and beautifully written ... Simply glorious, from start to finish' Rachel Clarke, author of Dear Life As an artist and writer, Mark Haddon has always created vivid and unforgettable images. Now he takes his own life as raw material, writing about growing up in the cultural wastelands of the English Midlands of the 1960s and 70s. Simultaneously heart-breaking and hilarious, Leaving Home is a portrait of the artist both as a child and as an adult. His parents were not really cut out for the job of having children. They were cut out, respectively, for the jobs of designing abattoirs and keeping a pathologically clean and tidy house. At least he had the consolations of The Weetabix Solar System Wallchart, walnut whips and the occasional Babycham. Astringently honest and scalpel sharp, this is a book about being different and seeing the world differently. It's about being a cartoonist and a care assistant. It's about family. It's about knickerbocker glories and heart surgery, about papier mâché and mental breakdown and great white sharks. It's about how art, in all its varied forms, provides a way of understanding and coming to terms with the mess of human life. It's richly illustrated throughout with images from the author's childhood, some of them altered in unforgiveable ways. As bracing as it is embracing, Leaving Home is about escaping a place that never felt like home and learning to create somewhere that does. 'I loved this funny, melancholy and arrestingly original memoir of an artist's coming into being. It also made me quite badly want a Walnut Whip' Sarah Perry, author of Enlightenment
'Tender, transporting, creative and beautifully written ... Simply glorious, from start to finish' Rachel Clarke, author of Dear Life As an artist and writer, Mark Haddon has always created vivid and unforgettable images. Now he takes his own life as raw material, writing about growing up in the cultural wastelands of the English Midlands of the 1960s and 70s. Simultaneously heart-breaking and hilarious, Leaving Home is a portrait of the artist both as a child and as an adult. His parents were not really cut out for the job of having children. They were cut out, respectively, for the jobs of designing abattoirs and keeping a pathologically clean and tidy house. At least he had the consolations of The Weetabix Solar System Wallchart, walnut whips and the occasional Babycham. Astringently honest and scalpel sharp, this is a book about being different and seeing the world differently. It's about being a cartoonist and a care assistant. It's about family. It's about knickerbocker glories and heart surgery, about papier mâché and mental breakdown and great white sharks. It's about how art, in all its varied forms, provides a way of understanding and coming to terms with the mess of human life. It's richly illustrated throughout with images from the author's childhood, some of them altered in unforgiveable ways. As bracing as it is embracing, Leaving Home is about escaping a place that never felt like home and learning to create somewhere that does. 'I loved this funny, melancholy and arrestingly original memoir of an artist's coming into being. It also made me quite badly want a Walnut Whip' Sarah Perry, author of Enlightenment
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Find Leaving Home Mark Haddon in PDF, EPUB, ebook, audiobook, print, or library editions.
Find Leaving Home Mark Haddon in PDF, EPUB, ebook, audiobook, print, or library editions.
2 books in catalog
Contemporary fiction and children's literature gained a defining crossover success with the publication of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a mystery narrative told through the distinctive perspective of a mathematically gifted teenage protagonist. Mark Haddon published this breakthrough work simultaneously for adult and young reader markets in 2003, winning seventeen literary prizes and establishing a distinct voice that bridges subtle comedic observation with profound emotional clarity.
Born on September 26, 1962, in Northampton, England, Haddon earned a Master of Arts in English Literature. Before achieving widespread fame as a novelist, he worked as an illustrator and cartoonist, contributing artwork and comic strips to publications such as The New Statesman, The Spectator, Private Eye, The Sunday Telegraph, and The Guardian. His early literary career focused on children's literature, beginning in 1987 with Gilbert's Gobstopper and continuing through more than a dozen titles, including the popular Agent Z series. He has also taught creative writing for the Arvon Foundation and maintains an active career in visual arts as a painter, illustrator, and sculptor.
Haddon's writing spans adult novels, poetry, plays, short fiction, and children's literature, frequently exploring domestic tension, psychological isolation, and the physical realities of human experience. His poetry collection The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea appeared in 2005, followed by his second adult novel A Spot of Bother in 2006. Later prose works include the short story collection The Pier Falls and the novel The Porpoise, which was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. Whether depicting complex family dynamics in works like Leaving Home or reinterpreting classical mythology, his storytelling relies on sharp observational detail, precise structure, and empathetic characterization.
2 books in catalog
Contemporary fiction and children's literature gained a defining crossover success with the publication of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a mystery narrative told through the distinctive perspective of a mathematically gifted teenage protagonist. Mark Haddon published this breakthrough work simultaneously for adult and young reader markets in 2003, winning seventeen literary prizes and establishing a distinct voice that bridges subtle comedic observation with profound emotional clarity.
Born on September 26, 1962, in Northampton, England, Haddon earned a Master of Arts in English Literature. Before achieving widespread fame as a novelist, he worked as an illustrator and cartoonist, contributing artwork and comic strips to publications such as The New Statesman, The Spectator, Private Eye, The Sunday Telegraph, and The Guardian. His early literary career focused on children's literature, beginning in 1987 with Gilbert's Gobstopper and continuing through more than a dozen titles, including the popular Agent Z series. He has also taught creative writing for the Arvon Foundation and maintains an active career in visual arts as a painter, illustrator, and sculptor.
Haddon's writing spans adult novels, poetry, plays, short fiction, and children's literature, frequently exploring domestic tension, psychological isolation, and the physical realities of human experience. His poetry collection The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea appeared in 2005, followed by his second adult novel A Spot of Bother in 2006. Later prose works include the short story collection The Pier Falls and the novel The Porpoise, which was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. Whether depicting complex family dynamics in works like Leaving Home or reinterpreting classical mythology, his storytelling relies on sharp observational detail, precise structure, and empathetic characterization.
